Inside the
Sacred Hopi
Homeland
By JAKE PAGE
Photographs by SUSANNE PAGE
LPH SECAKUKU, a member of the
Hopi Snake Society, held out his
pipe to me. Pungent smoke curled
from its clay bowl, fashioned
long ago into the form of a mountain lion.
We were squatting high on a hill that rises
improbably some 500 feet above the flat
plain south of Holbrook, Arizona. This was
the last stop on a four-day, 1,100-mile trek
made by eight Hopi priests accompanied by
two Hopi drivers, my wife, Susanne, and
myself. We now had visited the eight prin
cipal shrines that mark the boundaries of
the Hopis' ancestral land.
I took two puffs of the gray tobacco that
the Hopis gather on the desert hillsides of
the Southwest. Then, remembering that the
Hopis do many things in series of four, I took
two more puffs and handed the pipe back.
"I suppose,"
I joked, "that now I've
smoked with you, I can't make fun of you
any more." I had noticed the Hopi propensi
ty to poke fun at one another even during sol
emn events. "No," Alph replied. "It means
that you are now ikwatsi. That's a formal
word for 'friend.' You see, each time we pass
the pipe among us, we say 'uncle' or 'son'
depending on who we're handing it to. The
relationship is based on clan. Since you're
not a Hopi, you have no clan. But you are
our friend. Ikwatsi."
Susanne and I had made 18 visits to the
Hopis in the previous seven years, and we
counted many friends among this private
people. Still, it was an honor to be addressed
by this important word and to accompany
Hopi priests on this sacred mission. No non
Hopis had ever stood at the secret places we
had just visited; only 11 living Hopis have
seen all of them. We had been invited to
come along to document the shrines for NA
TIONAL GEOGRAPHIC on the Hopis' behalf.
The sacred sites themselves are unnotice
able, merely locations near rocks or bushes
where generations of Hopis have made of
ferings. At each place, Dalton Taylor, a
member of the Sun clan and a former rodeo
cowboy from the village of Shongopovi, had
dug in the dirt with his hands, guided by
spiral-shaped carvings inscribed on nearby
rocks. After some searching, he had found
the buried offerings. The men then prayed,
Keeper of ancient rites, a Hopipriest beckons to others on a pilgrimageto eight shrines
marking theirancestral land; one lies near these ruins of the Kawestima cliff dwellings
in northernArizona. Old problems and new confront the traditionalHopi way:
increasingcommercial demands on tribal land, boundary disputes, and the reluctance
of some younger Hopis to accept the often sternpracticesof theirelders.
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